“And I think, again, it’s this hype thing, isn’t it? You know, that people, enterprises want 5G because they’re sold on the idea of 5G. But once the discussion really happens, I think generally, probably in most cases, settles on a kind of an LTE network to begin with.
Opening Remarks: Setting the Scene for 5G, LTE, and AI in Private Networks
Welcome to GXC’s Monday Mashup, a podcast that gives you an inside look at GXC, our private cellular network platform, GXC Onyx, and the latest industry news to enable a world where enterprises can trust wireless connectivity to be simple.
Alan Proithis:ย So, hello and welcome to GXC’s Monday Mashup. I’m your host, Alan Proithis, and we’re excited to have today as our guest, James Blackman from RCR Wireless. James, welcome to the show.
James Blackman: Hi, Alan. Thanks for having me. It’s great to have a guy like yourself on.
Tracing James Blackmanโs Journey in Telecom Journalism
Alan Proithis: James, you have a broad view of what’s going on in the industry. But tell us what you do at RCR exactly and how you got into this journalism thing because you don’t see many six-year-olds who wake up in the morning and say, I’m going to be a tech journalist.
James Blackman: Yeah, I didn’t wake up at six years old wanting to be a tech journalist either. I’m an editor for RCR Wireless, a US-based telecoms trade title. I’ve been around a long time and I’m not an engineer. I’m not a techie. I was into writing, did part of a maths degree because I like numbers, then switched to a classics degree because I like words more, I guess. Then I trained as a journalist, lived in Mexico for a bit to pay my dues on local papers and stuff like that. This telecoms job was the first one I got when I returned.
Personal Reflections on the Telecommunications Landscape
James Blackman: It was almost like the first one I applied for, and I’ve been writing about it for 20 years. That’s kind of the story. But I’d say that RCR Wireless is the first time I’ve really enjoyed writing about telecoms, if you like. I mean, it’s always been good and interesting, but it feels like there’s something else at the moment. It feels like there’s something going on and there’s enough trouble in the world, if you like, that this stuff kind of matters at last in a bigger way.
Current Trends in the Telecommunications Sector
Alan Proithis: Well, I would sum it up, James, you have a natural curiosity crossing multi-disciplines, right? And it’s probably an excellent background given how broad you have to be to keep track of what’s going on. And I think that’s where I’d like to start, I guess, with you is that this is a really big space we work in. And I always joke that it’s really easy if you’re an expert on about 10 different technologies. But even from a market point of view, you have sort of the telco view of the world, which is, of course, why we were catching up in Barcelona two months ago at the big MWC event. But the world’s changing, and so much of this stuff now is being driven more from the enterprise side, the ecosystem side.
RCR’s Approach to Reporting in Telecommunications
James Blackman: The publication covers the whole broad telecom space if you like. We have five journalists, which have fairly specific news beats. Three in the US, I’m in the UK. We have somebody in Latin America as well, covering a kind of Latin America and the Asia Pacific. So there’s geographical coverage areas, there’s all the technologies in play. And I guess I’m covering this space from the outside a little bit.
So it’s not a telco-centric view of the market. I’m not that interested in traditional public telcos and 5G and smartphones. That kind of bores me a bit, you know. But even AI on the networks, and this kind of thing is less interesting to me than what kind of AI and network will enable in the enterprise if you like. I guess that’s the view. I mean, I think that’s really important, this kind of idea that not to have a telco-centric view of the technology.
Discussion on the Evolution of Private 5G/LTE Networks and AI
James Blackman: I think that’s important. I think the coverage reflects that generally from an RCR point of view. And it’s a very dynamic and interesting space. And I think the way spectrum’s been made available in certain markets and the technology’s been shrunk down and movements like Open RAN and all this kind of stuff mean that it’s anybody’s game. Anybody can be an operator, an enterprise can operate its own network now. So it’s a different kind of game, very dynamic, lots of different players involved.ย And part of the fun of it is really navigating that and charting that and looking at who’s, not who’s winning, but how the dynamic plays out kind of thing.
Alan Proithis:ย Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So that brings us to one of the things that struck me in Barcelona two months ago was how quickly the private cellular market seems to be moving forward. And we’re seeing it with our business. But the question is, what are you seeing out there in terms of, you know, it’s another one of those things we’ve been promised for a long time. It feels like it’s going a lot faster out there, but what are you seeing?
James Blackman: It’s a hard one, really, because I think there is a kind of a post-hype slump, you know, a little bit.ย I think the talk is done and the real kind of commercial business is now starting in earnest. I think that’s important. I think there are big, big companies that have placed fairly big bets on this and smaller companies that are taking a lot of investment as well. And I think they found the growth not to be as quick as they’d hoped. And I think there are other companies for which it’s going much better than they could have hoped, really. So generally, I think good business is being done.
I think it remains the great promise. There was a piece of research about how many enterprise premises, enterprise venues will take these networks. And they came up with this total of 14 or 15 million or something like that. And I’m not sure that it’s really changed what kind of cellular they take and how private it is, is to be determined. But I think the grand promise of it, especially with what’s happening in AI, I think stands up still. I think that is very good.
I think lots of interesting things are happening. But I guess my sense is that the hype has died down and that’s probably a good thing. And anybody who kind of thinks, why is it not going faster? There is a counter-argument which says, well, what did you think? I mean, did you really think this was going to go any faster? This is enterprise, it’s a complicated thing to sell.
Enterprise is all different. And just from writing about the IoT sector, you know, the silos that have to be kind of straddled and this kind of stuff as well. So there are huge challenges and I think they remain, but I think it’s going in a good direction.
Alan Proithis: Yeah, we’re seeing it too. And it’s funny too, like on the use case side, like IoT to me or 10,000 different use cases, we put this artificial label around. Whereas private cellular is a lot cleaner to me. But it does tend to start with something around either coverage or security from what we see. And that half my warehouse, half my factory, I can’t scan anything. I can’t run a tablet with a corporate app.
You know, it starts with sort of basic stuff like that. And very quickly, what we see is once they have a network, it’s like, oh, I can do computer vision. Oh yeah, I sort of need all my data all the time for AI and I couldn’t get that before. Yeah, that’s probably a really important thing. So I guess I’d ask you, you know, from a use case perspective, I mean, what do you see as some of the key use cases or drivers out there for adoption?
James Blackman: Yeah, I mean, I agree. That’s what I hear. I think there was lots of talk around ultra low latency and production line automation and all this kind of stuff, very kind of futuristic use cases in some regards. But I think the way it’s being sold is for new coverage, you know, where there isn’t coverage already or better coverage where the coverage doesn’t work. And it’s coverage amazingly.
I mean, who would have thought it? You know, that’s the reason these things are going in. And I agree that from what I hear, at least the IoT stuff is being built on top once the case has been made purely from a coverage point of view. I think the technology will develop as well. It’s a developing technology. It’s not finished. So new things will happen.
Some of those fancier use cases will happen. How niche they are remains to be seen. But I think definitely connectivity and coverage and capacity are the kind of things that are driving this forward. And it’s why you often see in outdoor big kind of campus areas and outdoor spaces in ports and mines and some of that kind of places where it’s a gimme kind of thing. And that seems to be the way it’s going. But like I say, it’s developing, new devices are coming out.
There has been a problem with availability of kind of IoT devices and chipsets and this kind of stuff. So I think everything’s moving in the right direction. It’s just it’s just not simple.
Alan Proithis: Well, people don’t realize how complex some of this technology is in the background. We’re taking technology that was originally created for public telcos and we’re condensing it and simplifying it. And for us, it’s different because we’re architected from the ground up as an enterprise-first system.
But it’s really easy to start talking like you’re talking to a telco in these conversations. And the enterprise doesn’t really care about terms like core or ran or things like that. They just want to know how it’s going to solve a problem.ย And part of our philosophy is the more we focus on those problems, the better off we all are. And to that end, one of my pet peeves in the industry is that the whole term 5G is not so much a technical term at this point. It’s a marketing term.
And we find a lot of folks say, I need a 5G network, need a 5G network. What are you going to do with it? Oh, I got some tablets. Yeah, we’ve been doing 5G. We won awards for the U.S. government for 5G. But we find in the majority of the cases, frankly, LTE is a much more cost effective solution in the beginning. And then down the road, maybe they need some 5G.
Now we see that starting to change and some people truly need 5G out of the box. But I’d love to hear your thoughts on when it comes to the actual technology you need due to the availability of devices and gateways and other things. I mean, how do you see the whole 5G LTE thing for private networks?
James Blackman: Yeah, I think that’s what I hear as well. I mean, I think what’s the stat at 2030, 2028 point tipping point at which there’s more 5G sales than 4G sales. I think most use cases certainly initially stood up on LTE networks. I think they’re very mature. There’s loads of devices for them. You know, and I think, again, it’s this hype thing, isn’t it? You know, that enterprises want 5G because they’re sold on the idea of 5G. But once the discussion really happens, I think generally probably in most cases settles on a kind of an LTE network to begin with.
And that point you make about ground-up kind of enterprise versions of these networks versus kind of telco down versions is important. I think there are two types in the market. I think there are kind of the big vendors that have shrunk down and actually shrunk down very well now. They’re systems. And then there are organizations like yourself, which have taken a kind of ground-up enterprise-first approach. And I think those are very serious propositions.
And I think in the end, that’s the way it will work. It has to look like an enterprise system. 5G has to disappear from the sales pitch, certainly. And it has to be kind of managed as a single system, whether it’s Wi-Fi or 5G, it has to all kind of come together.
Alan Proithis:ย Yeah, that’s the trick. I mean, to us, if we want to get that adoption, because we agree on the total market opportunity, there’s millions of systems because we really don’t see you have a choice is what we’re seeing because people are really concerned about going off public networks more and more.
And getting back to the whole industry in front of the other thing, you’re right. I mean, if you think about it, you know, not only the industry in front of them really get more momentum in Europe early, but sort of mobile originally, right? But as it matures, or as it becomes more understood, or if you call it digital transformation, when you enter a world where you have to connect every last thing and every nook and cranny, this sort of next wave, this fourth wave of industrial revolution to us requires a fourth wave of connectivity technology. And so we definitely see the upside, but that upside never really happens unless you make it as easy to use as enterprise Wi-Fi is our philosophy with what we do.
So I mean, that enterprise-first mentality is very consistent with how we see the world. But if we take a step up, James, where do you see the impact of AI over the next year or two? Because the ChatGPT has been with us now for what, going on two years. And I still remember my favorite Silicon Valley joke, you know, the difference between machine learning and AI, machine learning is written in Python and AI is written in PowerPoint.
And withChatGPT, it sort of changed that a little bit now, or it’s getting real and it’s getting everywhere and it’s going really, really fast. So, I mean, how do you see AI really impacting this whole space over the next year or two?
James Blackman: You know, it’s funny, because like I said, I was in Hanover Messe last week, and I went in a little skeptical about the whole AI thing, you know, hearing these kind of stories about hallucination and, you know, knowing what a mess kind of IoT has made traditionally of kind of data silos, and it’s still a job to get good data out of an IoT system. So I was kind of a little skeptical, but the likes of Siemens and others there were really went for it.ย And they’re very serious. And it’s pretty convincing. I think the way they’re deploying an industry, you know, factory floors is effectively kind of industrial kind of chatbots and kind of this kind of thing. And they’ve got, they’re looking at the guardrails around this. And, you know, I mean, the story of Hanover Messe, and there was a 5G arena, or what they’re calling a 5G industrial wireless arena there now, all on its own. And it was not that busy, but the AI story was thread through everything.
To be fair, 5G was on lots of the stands as well, but the AI crowd, whoever they are, didn’t take up a whole hall, you know, like the 5G crowd did. And I think it’s integrated, it’s in there. Everyone sounds very serious about it. There are use cases. They sound like they’re coming down the line pretty fast. And I think the interesting thing is that it gives another reason, not always, but sometimes to put in a private 5G network as well, or a private LTE network, because you need a bigger pipe basically.
And it also gives a way to, once you put the pipe in, it gives a way to process the data at the end of it, which we didn’t have before. I mean, you could take all this data out of an enterprise and it would sit there typically, you know, whereas now you can put an AI on it and it will make sense of that data and you can make use of it. And so that it is symbiotic that all of these technologies are, which is what is interesting and fascinating and, you know, great.
Alan Proithis: You’ve got to think it’s going to be great. Oh, absolutely. And I think we’re still in a very early learning stage, but to your point about the data, I think of that stat from a few years ago from IBM where, you know, they used to say 90% of corporate data is collected, but never touched. And you finally have a reason for ROI to touch all the data because with AI, you just need, I mean, I think chat GPT-3 was what, few hundred million in data and processing to build that thing and to get the models going. And of course that’ll get better really fast, but you need a incredible amount of data to get the full value out of AI. And I don’t know how you get that data if you can’t connect everything securely everywhere.
So it’s not going to happen overnight, but it’s definitely happening. But speaking of what’s happening, James, I want to wrap up with, it’s hard to believe that we’re one third done with the year already. And when you put it like that, it gets pretty scary. What do you think are the biggest things we can expect to see in the industry between now and the end of the year?
James Blackman: Apart from AI, Alan? I mean, I think smaller systems and the market will get smaller, probably as well. I think the take up in the small and medium-sized enterprise is going to be a trend accelerating through the year, certainly into next year, I would say. And then scalability, replicability, those kinds of things, which we’ve talked about, it seems forever, but I think as well, that will, again, carry on developing.
I think there are cases of that where these enterprises want to deploy in 80 sites and they want the same system in 80 sites. And I think that is happening. I don’t think you hear about it enough, but I do think it’s happening. And then I guess just, I think this probably, it sounds like a bit of a dodge really, but what we’ve discussed already about this idea that the discussion is around outcomes, which is the kind of industry term, the business case is looked at, it’s a team sport, it’s a collaborative exercise. I think that the whole ecosystem will work better together. I think the days of priming networks and priming these deals is gone.
And I think everybody’s got to kind of find a position, a happier position, I think. And I think there will be consolidation as well, I’ve got to say.
Alan Proithis: Yeah. It sounds like what you’re describing is a typical early market moving into a more mature growth market. In the beginning, there’s a lot of people, frankly, that over-invest too early, that don’t make it to the main show. There’s a lot of experimentation as the market figures out how to best buy and apply.
And then it feels like we’re just about done with that. It’s funny when I hear you talk about sort of big companies leading the charge and then sort of smaller to midsize getting it. Doesn’t it happen with everything? Whether it was the first mobile phones, the fax machine, computers, it’s sort of the path for everything if you think about it. So, we’re on that typical adoption path.
James Blackman: Yeah. And it’s amazing that we’re surprised by this. Every time we’re like, it’s getting slower and it should be faster. And you do think, well, this is a pretty standard trajectory really. And it is a difficult market. I think this idea that every industry is different and every enterprise in every industry is different and, therefore, every network potentially is different does stand up to an extent. It has to be simplified. It has to be made easier, but I think there is a whole lot of engineering that needs to be done.
I think that’s why the system integrators are doing are important in this market. But yeah, I think it’s a really good market. It’s a fun market to write about.
Alan Proithis: It’s also a fun market to work in every day. And I’m glad you’ve seen this shift, but James Blackman, tell us where people can find all the great stuff you’re writing.
James Blackman: You can find us online at rcrwireless.com and we’re scattered across social media and there’s loads of reports and all this stuff on industrial IT, private 5G, Industry 4, all the traditional telecom stuff as well.ย ย And it’s all on RCR.
Alan Proithis: Fantastic. I know I never mess up myself because there’s so much going on that you need things like RCR just to keep up with the basics and all the places.ย James Blackman, RCR Wireless, thank you very much for joining us on Monday Mesh Up.
James Blackman: Alan, thank you.
Conclusion | Embracing the Future: 5G, LTE, and AI in Private Networks
In conclusion, this episode of GXC MeshUp with Alan Proithis and James Blackman objectively examines the integration of 5G, LTE, and AI technologies in private networks. The discussion highlights the importance of adapting these technologies to meet enterprise needs rather than simply following market hype. Key insights include the gradual adoption of LTE as a starting point for most enterprises, the strategic deployment of 5G where necessary, and AI’s potential to enhance network functionality and data processing. As private networks evolve, the focus is increasingly on providing secure, reliable coverage and addressing specific business outcomes, reflecting a shift towards a more pragmatic and customized approach in the telecommunications industry. This episode underscores the dynamic nature of the telecom industry and its significant role in enabling the digital transformation of various sectors through innovative networking solutions.